A podcast about getting work done on iOS

Episode 2 – Using Editorial to Create Templates

Today’s episode is all about creating templates for publishing this podcast to WordPress. I use an app called Editorial and in today’s episode I’ll be sharing what that app is, what actions I’m using to build out this template, how the actions talk to each other and some other notes that should help you in building out your own templates.

If you like the show please review it in iTunes. Feedback and topic requests can be sent to iPadProsPodcast@gmail.com.

**Here’s what the developer says about the templates you can create, which is what this episode is all about: **

“Tired of copying and pasting boilerplate text? Simply create a template, so you don’t have to start from scratch every time you create a new document.

Templates are full-fledged workflows, so they can include variables, e.g. the current date/time or clipboard. You can even make templates that are based on Python scripts for a maximum of flexibility.”

The Actions I’m Using

Open URL

Option to open a URL in either built-in browser or Safari

Request Text Input (Can name the action to remind you what text you need to grab)

Option for Single Line or Multiple Lines

Set Variable

Allows you to save an action output as an easy to input variable you can use to build out a larger text document

Generate Text

Allows you to combine templated standard text used in every output along with the variables you previously created

Share Text or URL

Shares the final text output to the share sheet (where you can use Workflow or another app

How I’m Using these Actions

The Editorial template walks me through the process of posting an episode of this podcast.

It first takes me to YouTube (where I can upload the YouTube version of this podcast)

It then asks me for the Video Extras YouTube link (can also upload at this time) – if I don’t have an extra for that episode I can also add a note saying that it’s coming soon or not available for this episode.

It saves both of these links as variables to be used in final text output

It then takes me to Pippa to upload my podcast and copy my episode description to the template

It then asks me for the links and show notes, which I’ll copy from Ulysses

With all of these variables in place it generates the WordPress post that includes the episode description, standard text requesting reviews and where to send feedback. Followed by embed codes for both YouTube videos with headers of what the videos are. The template closes with the links and show notes which also has a header tag to make it look really clean for the final WordPress output.

That generated text is then sent to the share sheet to be used in Workflow that I have setup to send to WordPress.

Some Notes

You can pause before an action is carried out, which could be useful for adding something to your clipboard there is an iOS 11 bug that only lets you do this once, so that is something I’ll explore more of in the fall.